[Beowulf] channel bonding

[Tim Mattox]

This question/problem comes up all the time for bonding use
in Beowulf clusters.
Luckily, the bonding driver documentation is finally getting
some attention for the high performance usage of bonding
(in addition to it's more active use for high availability).

The latest version of the bonding documentation is here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=24692&package_id=146474

You should look particularly at section 13 "Configuring Bonding for
Maximum Throughput" in the latest version as of July 2005.

BTW - You did not mention at all how your switch(es) are
configured, which is a rather important part of the puzzle.

Note: As of kernel 2.6.12, the bonding.txt file found here:
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt
does NOT have this section.  I expect it will show up in
kernel 2.6.13.

Many thanks to Jay Vosburgh (the bonding driver maintainer)
for updating the documentation!

On 8/4/05, Eduardo N. Asada <asada at dsee.fee.unicamp.br> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I tried to configure ethernet channel bonding with two eepro100 NICs in a
> cluster with 8 nodes. First, I tried bonding only two machines by creating
> the ifcfg-bond0 and the slaves ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1, and making the
> appropriate changes in the modprobe.conf.
> 
> However, the communication between them became too slow and some services such
> as NIS and NFS became unavailable. Are there more things to care of ?
> 
> in modprobe.conf
> alias bond0 bonding
> options bond0 mode=balance-alb miimon=100
> 
> The output of ifconfig  is as follows:
> 
> bond0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:D0:B7:27:99:6E
>           inet addr:10.0.0.1  Bcast:10.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
>           inet6 addr: fe80::200:ff:fe00:0/64 Scope:Link
>           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MASTER MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>           RX packets:60436 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>           TX packets:490366 errors:198 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:198
>           collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
>           RX bytes:4252626 (4.0 MiB)  TX bytes:28888620 (27.5 MiB)
> 
> eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:D0:B7:27:99:6E
>           inet addr:10.0.0.1  Bcast:10.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
>           inet6 addr: fe80::2d0:b7ff:fe27:996e/64 Scope:Link
>           UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>           RX packets:29917 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>           TX packets:246908 errors:102 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:102
>           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
>           RX bytes:2240157 (2.1 MiB)  TX bytes:14682945 (14.0 MiB)
> 
> eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:D0:B7:2C:07:3C
>           inet addr:10.0.0.1  Bcast:10.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
>           inet6 addr: fe80::2d0:b7ff:fe27:996e/64 Scope:Link
>           UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>           RX packets:30519 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>           TX packets:243458 errors:96 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:96
>           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
>           RX bytes:2012469 (1.9 MiB)  TX bytes:14205675 (13.5 MiB)
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Eduardo N. Asada
> http://www.dsee.fee.unicamp.br/~asada
> email: asada at dsee.fee.unicamp.br
>          easada at ieee.org
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-- 
Tim Mattox - tmattox at gmail.com
  http://homepage.mac.com/tmattox/
    I'm a bright... http://www.the-brights.net/